Serdecznie zapraszamy na wykłady Prof. dr Susanne Marii Michaelis i prof. dra Martina Haspelmatha

Prof. dr Susanne Maria Michaelis Leipzig University & MPI-EVA (Leipzig)

https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/susanne-michaelis/

Principled Hybridization in Creole Languages

The talk is a general overview of creole languages relying on cross-creole analyses of various structural APiCS features with lots of maps and examples from diverse creole languages, so I hope it'll be interesting to a broad range of interested linguists.

Prof. dr Martin Haspelmath, MPI-EVA (Leipzig)

https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/

Efficient trade-offs of informativeness and length in grammar and lexicon

In this talk, I will focus on the role of coding efficiency in the lexical domain, following up on earlier work on coding efficiency in grammar (e.g. Haspelmath 2021, on form-frequency correspondences and predictability). I will start out from Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, which reflects communicative efficiency: Frequently expressed meanings are predictable and thus not very informative, and therefore languages can use short forms for them. But in addition to causing shortness of coding, communicative efficiency also causes frequently expressed meanings to be more differentiated – I call this “Mańczak’s Law of Differentiation” (Mańczak 1966; 1970). There is a substantial body of research that claims that lexical domains (such as colour terms, kinship terms, and body part terms) are more differentiated because of an efficient trade-off of informativeness and complexity (see Kemp et al. 2018 for a survey), but I will argue that informativeness trades off against length of coding rather than “complexity”.

References

• Haspelmath, Martin. 2021. Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form-frequency correspondences and predictability. Journal of Linguistics 57(3). 605–633. (doi:10.1017/S0022226720000535)
• Kemp, Charles & Xu, Yang & Regier, Terry. 2018. Semantic typology and efficient communication. Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1). 109–128. (doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011817-045406)
• Mańczak, Witold. 1966. La nature du supplétivisme. Linguistics 4(28). 82–89. (doi:10.1515/ling.1966.4.28.82)
• Mańczak, Witold. 1970. Sur la théorie die catégories “marquées” et “non-marquées” de Greenberg. Linguistics 8(59). 29–36. (doi:10.1515/ling.1970.8.59.29)